Threats to the nuclear establishment- the UK and a Nuclear Weapons Convention

Tim Street, Coordinator of ICAN-UK, reflects on the 2010 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference (NPT)- taking place at the UN in New York during May.

Threats to the nuclear establishment- the UK and a Nuclear Weapons Convention


With the UK General Election taking place during the first week of the NPT Review Conference, British pronouncements were thin on the ground (aside from joint EU and P5 statements) as the mandarins of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) withdrew from public gaze until a new government had been formed.
 
Workshops to be led by the UK, including an off-the-record briefing on behalf of the 'Western Group' of states and another on 'multinational approaches to the nuclear fuel cycle' were hurriedly postponed.
 
Apart from the silence imposed on officialdom in the early stages of the NPT, the FCO has spent significant energy on a public relations campaign concerning nuclear matters.
 
For example, as well as a Nuclear 2010 background paper prepared for the NPT (notable for its single reference to the UK's “nuclear defence”- not the usual “nuclear deterrent”), John Duncan (UK Ambassador for Multilateral Arms Control and Disarmament) has begun a regular blog and even 'tweets' on occasion.1 One blog entry in particular, entitled 'A Nuclear Weapons Convention: Legislating for Security', merits dissection.2
 
The blog begins by celebrating the new START nuclear arms reduction agreement between the US and Russia as the potential saviour of the NPT.
 
Importantly, Duncan sees a threat to the NPT's survival coming from “some commentators and NGOs” who are now “declaring the NPT obsolete”. Not only are these (unidentified) individuals clamouring for the NPT's downfall, but they are “calling for a brand new global agreement to ban nuclear weapons”.
 
At the 2010 NPT, the states supporting a Nuclear Weapons Convention have increasingly made themselves known. They include, in no particular order- and to name but a few- Indonesia, Switzerland, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Austria, New Zealand, Senegal, Iran, Yemen, Egypt, Costa Rica, Lebanon, Colombia and Malaysia.
 
The reason why these countries and civil society groups from around the world back a Nuclear Weapons Convention is because they realise the need to, as Mexican Ambassador Claude Heller puts it, “prohibit these weapons with a timeframe that provides certainty to the international community”.3
 
Such calls are imbued with a welcome sense of urgency. They stem from long-standing frustration amongst many of the non-nuclear-weapon states at the lack of progress on disarmament by the nuclear-weapon states and the failure to establish a Middle East WMD-free zone, measures which were central to the NPT's indefinite extension in 1995.
 
The beginning of negotiations now on a Nuclear Weapons Convention with “aspirational and practical steps” for the short and long term would thus finally provide the political momentum to reach the summit of abolition and realise the legal obligations for nuclear disarmament enshrined by the NPT.4
 
Instead, the brakes on the abolition locomotive are being applied precisely by leaders in London and Washington.
 
Worse, by planning to modernise their nuclear weapon systems, the US and UK could send the train the other way down the track, back towards the Cold War balance of terror.
 
Previously, the UK government has indicated that it is unwilling to take any further disarmament steps until the numbers of weapons held by the US and Russia are down to hundreds rather than thousands.
 
The new coalition government also plans to renew its Trident nuclear arsenal (last supported by the House of Commons in 2007), which may preclude it taking a lead on nuclear disarmament unless this position is overturned.
 
Thus in 2009 Foreign Office Minister Ivan Lewis stated that whilst “there may be a role for a Nuclear Weapons Convention in the future when the time comes to establish a final ban" calls for negotiations to begin now are “premature”.5
 
Ambassador Duncan goes far beyond this in his blog, positing that the “underlying thought that by legislating against nuclear weapons would make the world a safer place is a dangerous one” (sic).
 
He justifies this position by arguing that “the purpose of nuclear deterrence is to ensure that the weapons are never used”, meaning that the world is safer with the threat of nuclear war than without.
 
Dan Plesch has aptly described the nonsense of deterrence as “boiling down to arguing that the more dangerous things are, the more safer we are”, for example, if one believes that war can only be prevented by declaring a readiness to turn a conventional war into a nuclear war.6
 
The Ambassador goes on to state that “one cannot legislate for security even in the domestic environment...Laws against murder have unfortunately not prevented murders taking place”.
 
Such bizarre logic (which ignores elementary objections e.g. laws and their enforcement are desirable because they reduce crime) is carried over into a denial that we may draw lessons for nuclear abolition from the bans on landmines or cluster munitions.
 
As Rebecca Johnson has pointed out in a new Abolition 2000 paper, such sentiments are pure scaremongering. For, as with these bans and the chemical and biological weapons conventions, “a nuclear prohibition treaty would build on and eventually incorporate and supercede previous legal instruments”.7
 
With the election over and the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition in place, we shall observe the UK's contribution to the NPT over the next two weeks with interest, to see whether it shall, as Nuclear 2010 professes “pave the way towards a safer world without nuclear weapons”.
 
However, given that Liam Fox- the new Defence Secretary- stated in his first speech that “We have got a very clear agreement that we will continue with the nuclear deterrent”, it is hard not to prepare for inertia- unless, of course, the Liberal Democrats follow UK public opinion and stand up for disarmament.8
 
A version of this article appeared in Reaching Critical Will's 'NPT News in Review' on 27th May 2010.

Notes
 

1 UK FCO, 'Nuclear 2010', http://www.fco.gov.uk/en/global-issues/weapons/nuclear-2010/

2 John Duncan, 'Arms Control Blog', http://blogs.fco.gov.uk/roller/duncan/

3 The Acronym Institute, 'Day 9 at NPT', http://acronyminstitute.wordpress.com/

4 Patricia Lewis, 'Life at 40: Prospects for the NPT and the 2010 Review Conference', Arms Control Association, http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2010_03/Lewis

5 UK Parliament, Hansard, 30th June 2009, http://services.parliament.uk/hansard/Commons/ByDate/20090630/writtenans...

6 Dan Plesch, The Future of Britain's WMD, http://www.danplesch.net/articles/6-WMD-Report.html, p.3

7 Rebecca Johnson, Nuclear Weapons Abolition: an idea whose time has come, Abolition 2000 UK, p.12

8 'Conflict looming over defence cuts', Lancashire Telegraph, 12th May 2010, http://www.lancashiretelegraph.co.uk/news/general_election_2010/news/816...